Earle Meadows

Earle Meadows clears the bar to set an Olympic record at the 1936 Games in BerlinUPI/Corbis-Bettmann

Earle Meadows, (born June 29, 1913, Corinth, Miss., U.S.—died Nov. 11, 1992), American pole-vaulter who, tied with Bill Sefton, set the world record in 1937 of 4.54 m (14 feet 11 inches). Meadows and Sefton were nicknamed “the Heavenly Twins.”

Both vaulters competed for the University of Southern California (Los Angeles). They tied for the event in the 1935 Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) meet with vaults of 4.23 m and at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) meet the same year with vaults of only a 1/4-inch difference. At the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, Meadows won the gold medal with a vault of 4.35 m (14 feet 3 1/4 inches). In the 1937 AAU meet, Sefton won and Meadows came in third. Later in the same year, Meadows tied with Sefton again, as did George Varoff and Cornelius Warmerdam, the vaults being 4.45 m (14 feet 7 5/8 inches). Still later, Meadows and Sefton tied for the world record. Meadows won the AAU pole vault in 1940 and 1941, and at the age of 35 he could still clear 4.27 m.